The High Price of Boosting Test Scores

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

HIGHER TEST SCORES COME AT A HIGH PRICE TO EDUCATION
   Baltimore Sun Opinion Column -- July 11, 2006
                  by John Monahan

Great news: Test scores for Maryland students went up. Politicians, 
education officials and school administrators have been congratulating 
themselves on the achievement. Even the scores in Baltimore went up. Do 
you know what that means? Absolutely nothing.

That's right, it doesn't mean anything because the test doesn't measure 
or predict anything. Higher scores don't mean that children are better 
educated, are more likely to graduate or have a better chance of getting 
into college or have a well-paying job.

We're told that the tests measure academic achievement. Education 
officials, while scrambling to find cover from the No Bureaucrat Left 
Behind law, like to tout these rising scores, saying they indicate the 
improvement of education in the state.

What they don't tell you is that the increasing scores measure only the 
schools' ability to prepare students for the tests. The schools are 
frequently putting all of their energy and resources into test 
preparation, to the exclusion of everything else.

I experienced an illustrative example of this while teaching high school 
biology. In the perennial struggle to cram an ever-increasing curriculum 
into a single school year, I was trying to prioritize which units to 
emphasize and which ones to survey quickly. I assumed that much of the 
human body unit was redundant because all of my 11th-grade biology 
students had taken health class. I was horrified to discover that none 
of them had. These were city 11th-graders who hadn't yet gotten a basic 
knowledge of how to keep themselves healthy or prevent sexually 
transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The reason for this 
flagrant omission was simple: There was no High School Assessment for 
health.

Incoming freshmen must pass the tests in English, algebra, American 
government and biology in order to graduate. Everything from the morning 
announcements to their class schedules to the length of class periods 
was directed toward the goal of getting them to pass these four tests.

School administrators are highly motivated to do this because the scores 
are used to evaluate the schools. Funding, staffing, even the future of 
whether some schools will exist hinges upon the scores in these four areas.

Students were told every day, both directly and subtly, that all anyone 
cared about were the test scores. Weeks of valuable and limited class 
time were taken up preparing for the tests. Students were repeatedly 
given practice questions from previous tests. The entire curriculum was 
designed with the goal of improving test scores.

None of the higher-ups seemed terribly concerned about whether the 
students understood the material. Topics that the test emphasized were 
to be emphasized in class. For instance, a great deal of the biology 
test features questions about the chemistry of living things, so biology 
class was moved from the ninth-grade curriculum to the 11th grade in 
order for the students to have chemistry first.

Evolution is one of the most fundamental elements to understanding 
modern biology, but only one or two questions on the biology assessments 
were about evolution. It was consequently de-emphasized in the 
curriculum. Classification, animal behavior, the fossil record - all 
were given short shrift. Why? They're not on the test.

I'm sure this phenomenon is not isolated to biology. Ask an algebra 
teacher how much of the test is algebra. Ask a social studies teacher 
which aspects of American government the test emphasizes and which it 
omits.

This type of test-driven mania calls into question the real goal of 
education. Is it to give students a fundamental understanding of all of 
the subjects they will need to be informed, healthy, successful 
citizens? Or is the role of education simply to raise test scores so 
politicians and bureaucrats will have something to brag about?

John Monahan teaches science at Patterson High School in Baltimore. His 
e-mail is gurpsman@hotmail.com.

  
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